This invention relates in general to the field of data communication and more particularly to a system and method for the production of billing statements.
Service and product providers must bill their customers. To do so, these service and product providers, such as cable television operators, local telephone service providers, long distance telephone providers, and credit card companies, must produce periodic billing statements for each of their customers. In the case of a cable television operator, each customer receives a monthly billing statement. A single cable television company may operate numerous cable television franchises in several geographic regions, covering millions of customers. Each of these customers receives a billing statement each month.
Billing statements are often printed and mailed by bill renderers, which a service provider, such as a cable television operator, will contract to produce its billing statements. In this arrangement, the service provider often furnishes the bill renderer with the customer data to be printed on the billing statements.
Prior to printing the bills, they must be generated, edited and appropriately messaged. As far as generating the bills are concerned, it is necessary to determine where on the customer billing statement the various textual information is to appear. Ideally, the service or product provider would like to have the flexibility to change the format of the billing statement without having to physically type the textual information from scratch upon each change in the bill run format. Billing and reporting information traditionally has been presented in a format with little or no flexibility for altering, without significant effort, the presentation of the information appearing on the bill or report.
As far as bill messaging is concerned, it is necessary to include a variety of messages, notices and inserts with the bill. However, there are limitations on how much material may be included on a standardized billing statement, which usually consists of a perforated sheet of paper, a portion of which is returned with payment. When all of the messages will not fit on the available space on the bill, some of the messages are merely omitted, regardless of priority or importance. There is no known system for prioritizing the universe of messages that could appear on a bill and then print them on the available space according to their priority. In addition, there are weight considerations which must be observed to avoid having the customer billing statement exceed the cost of first class postage.
These and other considerations are addressed by the bill generator, editor and messaging system and method according to the preferred embodiment.
It an object of the present invention to provide a bill editor and generator which is flexible in its ability to modify the format of the customer billing statement.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a bill editor and generator which facilitates the process of bill editing and generating.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a bill messaging system which prints notices and messages on a customer billing statement according to a predetermined priority in the space allocated on the billing statement for such notices and messages.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a bill insert system which provides inserts to the customer billing statement according to a predetermined priority without exceeding the cost of the prevailing weight limit of the preferred postal class.
These and other objects of the invention are accomplished by a report/bill editor and generator and messaging system and method of the preferred embodiments. The terms bill and report are used interchangeably and should be understood as such. The bill/report editor and generator system and method comprises a single module in the bill production processor. The report editor is a graphical editor which allows a report designer to use a palette of tools to customize where data is to appear on a report or bill. The report designer will decide how the report/bill will generally appear, and using the tools, create a graphical layout of where the textual information will physically appear on the report. The report editor accesses database catalogs which contain table names, table column names and stored procedures. The report generator facilitates generation of reports.
The report designer has at least three types of tools to generate the report""s layout, static text tools, dynamic text tools and paragraph areas. Static text refers to elements such as labels and heading appearing in the report and their geometries and contents as well. Dynamic text refers to data retrieved from the database. The dynamic aspects of the report editor and generator refer to the order in which the paragraphs are to be generated in the report, and the stored procedures used to retrieve the data. Finally, paragraphs and paragraph areas refer to areas allocated on the report where repetitive information is to appear. Once defined, paragraphs describe the mutual containment relationships of text.
Once the report editor has defined the layout of a report, a report definition file (RDF file) is stored in temporary memory. At some time in the future, the report may be run by a report generator program. The report generator program reads the RDF file from temporary memory. The RDF file describes how the report is to appear, where the data is stored and where it is supposed to draw the data on the report. The report generator queries the database under the control of the RDF file. The report generator pulls the data specified by the RDF file, and prints it in the manner specified by the RDF file. The report generator, on user demand, uses a report definition to get data from the database (and the user, if necessary) and generates the report defined by the report definition. The report generator can generate the report in any of the typical places supported on the native platform: screen, paper or disk. In other words, the user can specify that instead of printing the information on paper, it can be drawn in a window on a computer screen, or written to a file on a disk, which can be accessed at a later time without having to go back to the database.
The bill message, notice and insert system and method comprises a bill definition portion followed by a bill run portion. The bill definition portion comprises a series of definitions which are input by the billing personnel whereas the bill run portion determines which messages, notices and inserts eventually make it into the customer billing statement. More particularly, in the bill definition portion, the billing personnel define the universe of available messages for a given billing cycle. The billing personnel also identify a universe of inserts available for the billing cycle. Each insert has a known weight. Next, the billing personnel define the criteria of information to be included on the bill. This could include account information, collections history, product history, etc. Next, the billing personnel assign a priority to each of the messages, notices and inserts. In other words, the billing personnel interact with a system to specify the types of messages, the criteria of information to be included in that particular bill run and the associated priority of the messages and notices. The system then processes this information in the bill run portion to generate a bill which conforms to the weight and space limitations of the customer billing statement.
More particularly, the bill run portion of the system then qualifies each message, notice and insert against stored information about each customer. Only messages, notices and inserts relevant to a particular customer qualify for that customer. The qualifying messages and notices are stored in temporary memory. Then, all of the qualifying messages and notices are arranged according to priority, and only those that fit on the bill are eventually printed. At the same time, all of the qualifying inserts are stored in temporary memory. Only those inserts which, according to the predetermined insert priority, will make the final bill equal to or less than the weight limit of the preferred postal class are included in the customer billing statement.
Other objects, features and advantages of the preferred embodiments will become apparent when the detailed description is read in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.